Vienna is a city with many family ties.
Péter worked here for nearly a year and a half before marrying Ilona.
But with the help of a friend, Ilona also did a lot of shopping in Vienna in the 1980s for ingredients not available in Hungary, but mainly for drinks at Pierrot's.
Roy also has many stories to tell about the city.
After graduating, he moved to Vienna and became the CEO of Paybox.net AG, a mobile payment system, to set up the first mobile payment service in Europe. Unfortunately, when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, the Vienna project also went bust. There are no coincidences, maybe if there is no economic crisis and Paybox is successful, Ilona's wish will come true and Roy will never join the family business...
The story continued in a different way, but the attachment to Vienna did not disappear.
The Jamie Oliver restaurant franchise rights were granted to the Zsidai Group for the whole of Central Europe. After the success in Budapest, expansion in Vienna seemed trivial.
It is not easy to open a restaurant in Vienna, the bureaucracy is much tougher than in Hungary and it is almost impossible to get an operating licence as a new entrant. The market is heavily regulated.
Finally, after a long renovation and construction, the restaurant opened on 31 October 2017.
But our "40 years, 40 stories" series is not just about huge successes.
After almost two years of struggling with operations, it was clear that running such a large restaurant from Budapest was almost impossible. The family looked for a solution and the involvement of a local gastronomic group became one: the contract was signed in January 2020.
Not only did this save the Zsidai Group from a cumbersome operation, but it also meant that the then unprecedented worldwide Covid epidemic hit the group in one less place.
Life is a big player. What we experience as failure one day may be a relief the next.
We loved Jamie Oliver's Italian Wien restaurant, with its wonderful art deco and Viennese café-inspired interiors, it was the most elegant Jamie's restaurant in the world.
